Julian L. Simon

Short Biography

Julian L. Simon teaches Business Administration at the
University of Maryland and is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute.
His main interest is the economic effects of population changes.
The Ultimate Resource (now The Ultimate Resource 2) and Population Matters discuss trends in the
United States and the world with respect to resources, environment,
and population and the interactions between them. Simon concludes
that there is no reason why material life on earth should not
continue to improve, and that increasing population contributes to
that improvement in the long run. Those popularly-written books
develop ideas introduced in the l977 technical book, The Economics
of Population Growth and supported by the 1984 The Resourceful Earth
(edited with Herman Kahn), the 1986 Population and Economic Growth
Theory, and the 1992 Population and Development in Poor Countries.

His most recent books are the edited The State of Humanity
(November, 1995), and The Ultimate Resource 2 (November, 1996).

Simon has also written on a variety of other subjects,
including statistics, research methods, the economics of
advertising, and managerial economics. His other books include How
To Start and Operate A Mail Order Business, Basic Research Methods
in Social Science, Issues in the Economics of Advertising, The
Management of Advertising, Applied Managerial Economics, Patterns of
Use of Books in Large Research Libraries (with H. H. Fussler),
Effort, Opportunity, and Wealth, and Good Mood: The New Psychology
for Overcoming Depression. He is the author of almost two hundred
professional studies in technical journals, and he has written
dozens of articles in such mass media as Atlantic Monthly, Readers
Digest, New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

Simon worked in business and ran his own mail-order firm before
becoming a professor, and has also been a naval officer. He is the
inventor of the airline overbooking plan, in use since 1978 on all
U.S. airlines, which solves the overbooking problem by calling for
volunteers instead of bumping people involuntarily. He has dis-
cussed his work on such programs as Today, Good Morning America,
Firing Line, Wall Street Week, National Public Radio, national
television in Great Britain, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Israel, and
other foreign countries.